The man who beat communism

Ronald Reagan was fond of a nap and no intellectual. Oddly enough, he had what it took

HE WAS, most clear-thinking people clearly saw, not the right man for the job. To be president of the United States in the cold-war thunderstorms and economic frost of the early 1980s, you needed to be somebody with a mind sharp enough to carve through half a dozen problems at a time, somebody who could spend 18 hours a day rationally assembling facts and figures, a natural chairman of all-powerful committees: you needed to be, well, a clear-thinking person.

Ronald Reagan, as the ghost in this week's sky would cheerfully admit, was not at all like that. Only a fortnight from 70 when he became president, the one-time minor film actor often glazed over in cabinet meetings. He disliked, and sometimes dodged, painful arguments with awkward colleagues. He could fail to notice murky things going on behind his back. He was a definite non-intellectual. He was bound, in short, to be a bit of a bumbler.

Instead of which, the Reagan presidency of 1981-89 changed the face of the world. The American-led alliance won the cold war, a potentially even bloodier confrontation than the first world war's murderous clash of European nationalisms and the second world war's six-year struggle against would-be Superman Hitler and his friends. By defeating communism, Ronald Reagan ended one of history's most violent centuries and opened the door to the possibility that for at least a few decades ahead war, though it can never be abolished, would be a smaller horror than in the past, and democracy might become available to more of the people who wanted it. In his foreign policy, at any rate, he turned out to be one of the two or three most effective American presidents of the 20th century.

It was hard to imagine that this would happen when he was elected in 1980. The late 1960s and the 1970s had seen a powerful counter-attack by communism against its semi-defeat in the Cuba crisis of 1962. The Soviet Union had squashed Czechoslovakia's attempt to win a little freedom for central Europe, and had set about disconnecting western Europe from America's nuclear protection by building a nuclear missile force of its own that could hit America. The North Vietnamese army had helped its local friends to impose a one-party communist dictatorship on a South Vietnam most of whose people did not want it. The Russians were busily constructing a network of alliances in the Middle East and Africa. The cold war, it seemed, might roll on forever.

Reagan would have none of this. From the moment he took office, he made it clear what he believed: that America stood for a good idea, the Soviet Union for a bad one; that the notion of a balance of power between them—“mutually assured destruction”—was thus morally wrong; and that the Russians' bulging military muscle had no real economic power behind it. Therefore he decided to pour money into America's armed forces, and (pace the Greenham Common ladies) put medium-range nuclear missiles into Europe; that way, Europe's defence would not need an American intercontinental strike. If a rearmed America stood nose-to-nose with its adversary, and firmly but politely refused to budge, he reckoned it would win the day. He was right. By the year Reagan left the White House, the Russians had lost eastern Europe; by the next year, they had abandoned communism.

To be sure, Reagan's foreign policy was not perfect. He did not know what to do about Cuba. He was blurry about China. He did little about Israel and Palestine. His liking for Mikhail Gorbachev at one point almost led him into giving the last Soviet leader a foolish and unnecessary nuclear concession.

The worst episode of the Reagan presidency was the Iran-contra affair. The president secretly authorised the sale of American-made weapons to some supposed moderates in the Iranian government; the money thus raised was given to the contras, the American-backed rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua. The whole thing involved much lying, some blush-making quibbles when the lies were found out, and—if you believe the official story—a president who did not know what some of his officials were up to. This week's nit-pickers do have some genuine nits to pick.

Nor should Reagan's admirers claim that without him the collapse of communism would never have happened. It would have collapsed anyway, in the end. A system which believes that a small group of self-selected possessors of the truth knows how to run everything is sooner or later going to run into the wall. But Reagan brought the wall closer. He got the American economy growing again (admittedly at a price), which made more Russians realise their own system's incompetence; he could therefore spend far more money on America's military power; and he put those new missiles into Europe. The result: maybe 20 years less of Marxist-Leninist ideological arrogance, and of the cold war's dangers.

That gut feeling

How did he do it, those puzzled intellectuals still ask? By being primally American: nonchalant, ever-hopeful, tough as an old boot when necessary. By plucking the hearer's heart, in speeches written for him by speech-writers who knew what phrases—“the surly bonds of earth”, “the boys of Pointe du Hoc”—would flow naturally from his lips. But above all by knowing that mere reason, essential though it is, is only half of the business of reaching momentous decisions. You also need solid-based instincts, feelings, whatever the word is for the other part of the mind. “I have a gut feeling,” Reagan said over and over again, when he was working out what to do and say.

And what might he be thinking this week, now that he has cast aside the particularly surly bonds of his last years on earth? Ronald Reagan believed in American power, not just the military sort of power but also economic strength and that special American gusto. He had no problem with the idea of an American imperium. But he did not mean by that word an empire of the sort the Europeans used to have.

The European empires were far-off lands controlled by the imperial power, which sent out its soldiers and judges and “collectors” to govern them. When the end of the cold war opened the door to a new, post-20th-century world, Reagan hoped that American power could now be used to help far-off people decide for themselves how they should be governed. He reckoned most of them would choose the democratic road, bumpy though it often is—and be duly grateful to America. There was nothing wrong or ignoble about that hope.

He will therefore be directing a look of kindly relief at this week's decision by the United Nations, which has at last given its approval to the process by which America hopes to get an elected government into power in Iraq by the end of next year (see article). Ronald Reagan would certainly have had qualms about the way his successor George Bush fought the Iraq war. He himself would have coaxed European doubters, not hectored them. He would have wanted things much better organised against the predictable outbreak of guerrilla violence after the conventional battle had been won. But he is surely now hoping that, if his countrymen and their allies can stick to their guns and their principles, post-Saddam Iraq can begin to be part of a newly expanding empire of democracy.